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Anarchists Never Surrender
Essays, Polemics, and Correspondence on Anarchism, 1908-1938
By Victor Serge, Mitchell Abidor PM Press
Copyright © 2015 PM Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-053-3
CHAPTER 1
The Illegalists
(Editor's note: Émile Armand, later to be one of Serge's closest friends, was a central figure of anarchist individualism.)
ARMAND'S CONVICTION IN PARIS FOR COUNTERFEITING HAS BROUGHT BACK the old question of the illegalists.
I don't know Armand or the details of his affair. And so without showing any particular interest in his personality — toward which I only feel that sentiment of fraternity that binds all the militants of the idea — I will simply pose questions of principle.
What should our attitude be toward illegalists (in the economic sense of the word, i.e., people living off illicit labor) and particularly toward the comrades in that category?
The answer seems so clear to me that if I hadn't heard numerous discussions on this subject — and even in our circle — the idea of writing this article would never have occurred to me.
We approve and admire the antimilitarist who either by desertion or by some other means refuses to serve the masters' fatherland, and in so doing puts himself in open combat against society, whose law he violates: that of military service, otherwise known as servitude owed the state.
After this, how can we disavow that other comrade whose temperament bows as little before the regime of the workshop as the antimilitarist bows before that of the barracks and who, by some illegal method, puts himself in a state of revolt against the law of the slavery of work?
Every revolt is in essence anarchist. And we should stand alongside the economic rebel (when he is conscious, of course) the same way we stand beside the political, antimilitarist, or propagandist rebel.
All rebels, through their acts, are our people. Anarchism is a principle of struggle: it needs fighters and not servants the way statist socialism does, machines with complicated gears that have only to allow themselves to vegetate in order to live in a bourgeois fashion.
But it seems proper to me to trace a limit. I said above "economic rebel," for if the Duvals and the Pinis, who steal because they can't submit to the oppression of the bosses, are our people, it isn't the same for many so-called anarchists who have paraded through the various criminal courts over the past few years. Theft is often nothing but an act of cowardice and weakness, for the man who commits it has no other goal than to escape work, while at the same time escaping the difficulties of social struggle. Before the jury, instead of being a common criminal the burglar or the counterfeiter declares himself an "anarchist" in the hope of being interesting or looking like a martyr to a cause he knows nothing about. He finds nothing better to respond to the judge who condemns him but the traditional and ever so banal "Vive l'anarchie!" But if this cry in other mouths has taken on a powerful resonance, here it has a flimsy title to our solidarity.
For our part these unfortunates deserve neither sympathy nor antipathy. They aren't rebels but escapists. They have clumsily escaped from the social melee. More clever, more daring, or luckier they would have "arrived" and become bankers, functionaries, or merchants — in a word, honest men. They would have legislated against us like vulgar Clemenceaus and without hesitation would have sent their unlucky brethren to the penal colonies. Such shipwrecks denote so much weakness and powerlessness that they can only inspire pity.
Between them and the militant who steals though revolt, the distance is as great as that between a revolutionary terrorist and the highway murderer who kills a shepherd in order to steal ten sous from him. One is a rebel of conscience, the other a rebel through powerlessness or bad luck. The act of the former is an act of revolt; the act of the latter is that of a brute too stupid to imagine better.
To stand alongside economic rebels does not in the least mean preaching theft or erecting it into a tactic. This method has so many drawbacks that preaching it would be madness. It is admissible and nothing more. Noting this simply means acting as an anarchist who doesn't fear that what he says will be heard, and having the courage to take his reasoning to its limits.
Admissible, and nothing else. For the anarchist, if he doesn't care about bourgeois legality and honesty, must above all aim at preserving himself as long as possible for action and realizing to the greatest extent possible for himself the life he desires. His work, rather than appearing harmful and destructive, should be a work of life, a long apostolate of stubborn labor, of goodness, of love. In order to partake of this ambiance, the new man, the man of the future must live with goodness, fraternity, and love. In this way, when he will have passed he will have left behind him a trail of sympathy and astonishment that will do more for propaganda than a whole life of petty and shady struggles could have done.
But to work at his labor of life and to preserve himself all means are good, for in order to reach the summits of clarity the route is often dark.
(Le Communiste 14, June 20, 1908)
CHAPTER 2
Émile Henry
I THINK THAT ACTS OF BRUTAL REVOLT STRIKE THEIR TARGET, FOR THEY awaken the masses, shake them up with the lashing of a whip, and show the real face of the bourgeoisie, still trembling at the moment the rebel climbs the gallows.
To those who say to you that hatred doesn't engender love, answer that it is living love that often engenders hatred.
First, a few words to the comrades.
Let them not reproach me for glorifying a man, making him into a banner. We want neither tribunes nor martyrs nor prophets. But in order to be strong you have to know yourself, and in order to better support the struggles of today you have to know the joys and fears of past hours. And then it is so good, in this world governed by so many crooked interests, among the base masks that surround us, to once again see the clear profiles of those who were able to be honest in a humanity of brutes.
I will also not write an apology for murder of whatever kind. Murders will be the most painful page in our history. And it is certainly one of society's greatest crimes to have forced us, we who want peace and love, to shed blood.
On May 21, 1894, Émile Henry, twenty-one and a half years old, died on the gallows at la Roquette Prison in Paris.
The previous April 28 he had been sentenced to death by the jury of the Seine, having admitted his guilt in a series of terrorist attacks: "The explosion on the Rue des Bons-Enfants, that killed five people and led to the death of a sixth; the explosion at the Café Terminus that killed one person, mortally wounded another, and wounded a number of others; finally, six shots fired at those who pursued him." He had acted with complete lucidity and never once sought to attenuate the terror his acts inspired.
He was twenty-one; it was the springtime of his life; it was the month of May, the spring of nature; and though the death sentence was certain, his tranquil courage, made up of intelligence and enthusiasm, never flagged for a second.
The son of a worker and a worker himself, having worked in a shop. A rational education backed by a remarkable spirit of logic and observation led him to anarchism. At first, simply revolted by the sight of social injustice he became a socialist. "Attracted to socialism for a moment," he said, "it didn't take long for me to move away from the party. I loved freedom too much, had too much respect for individual initiative, too much repugnance for being part of a group to take a number in the matriculated army of the Fourth Estate. In any case, I saw that in the end socialism changes nothing of the current order. It maintains the authoritarian principle and this principle, whatever socalled free-thinkers might say, is nothing but a holdover of faith in a supreme power." His studies showed anarchism to be "a gentle morality in harmony with nature that will regenerate the old world." He became a militant.
The strike in Carmaux had just aborted, killed by politicians, leaving the workers weakened and starving. In the general depression Émile Henry decided to make heard a voice more fearful and virile than that of speechmakers: dynamite. It told the defeated who the real revolutionaries were; it told the victors that outside the speechifiers and the passive crowd that there were men who knew how to act.
Then came the Vaillant Affair (who was guillotined for having thrown a bomb in the Chamber of Deputies). The repression was frightful; in just a few days mass arrests, searches, confiscation of publications, and expulsions decimated the ranks of the propagandists. The rebels were hunted down. Henry responded with an act: the bomb in the Café Terminus.
He was arrested.
At the hearings his calm and tranquility were disconcerting. The newspapers said this was either cynicism or an act. Not at all! It was the satisfied awareness of someone certain of having lived a useful and beautiful life. An actor? It's a strange actor who throws his head to the spectators.
For his judges he had subtle raillery, astounding responses. When the president of the tribunal evoked Henry's bloodstained hands, Henry pointed at his red robe. When the same man reproached him for having abandoned a military career begun at the École Polytechnique, he had this marvelous response: "A beautiful career to be sure. One day they would have ordered me to fire on the unfortunate like Commandant Chapu at Fourmies. Thanks, but I'd rather be here."
Up to the guillotine he remained as good, as brave. And can anyone say that such an end wasn't worth more than the long labor of the submissive and pointless death in a hospice or a park bench? To be sure, there are other struggles that are less bloody and perhaps more useful; to be sure, speech that inspires enthusiasm, the written word, the invincible propagator of ideas, and above all a life spreading examples of love and fraternity are means of combat that are more beautiful. But to end by delivering an axe-blow to the crumbling edifice, to end with the consciousness of having contributed even a bit to the great labor of emancipation, was a hundred times better that the idiotic death of a worker filling the bosses' safes.
On the gallows his dry throat launched at the radiant May sun a cry of hope and bravery that that the sound of the blade couldn't stifle: "Courage, comrades! Vive l'anarchie!"
It was a death whose memory will live on. A death which free men will later remember with gratitude. For alongside the people of our century, the arrivistes, crushers, deceivers of all kinds; the immense mass of imbecilic followers and serfs, this young man marching toward death when everything in him wanted to live, this young man dying for the ideal is truly a luminous figure.
His blood was a beautiful seed from which new fighters will be born. And some day soon, when the wind will spread fire and construct barricades, the bourgeois who thought they'd crushed the new idea with bullets and guillotines will see the fatal harvest bloom.
Yes, anarchy is an ideal of peace and happiness. Yes, we love men with an infinite love, and every drop of their blood causes us pain. And it's because we love him, because we want to see him free, good, and happy, that we are merciless toward everything that blocks the road of humanity on its march toward the light!
(Le Communiste, May 23, 1908)
CHAPTER 3
Apropos of the Congo
THE CONGO IS ON THE ORDER OF THE DAY. EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT IT. There are those who want it and those who don't. I am among the latter.
Those who want it have some good arguments: fatherland, brave Belgium, colonial power, expansion, outlets for trade, civilization ... I know we need outlets where we can send our spoiled preserves, our cardboard shoes, and the scoundrels we don't know what to do with at home and to whom we confide the great mission of civilizing the blacks. I also know there are peoples guilty of being Negro and who must be inoculated with our genius, syphilis, and religion. I know that gunning down people who don't resemble us is a beautiful and noble task, but I'm a sentimental type and none of this really convinces me.
Those who don't want it talk about millions: it'll cost us this much or this much or that much — zero, zero, comma, zero — and the millions line up in horrific columns. This is what we'd have to pay for the Congo. But since I'm not a millionaire this leaves me cold. Even more because my small nest egg will disappear anyway, either for this or for the fortifications of Antwerp, the basilica of Koekelberg, or some other equally useful institution.
When people talk to me about the Congo, I think about something else. Even if we aren't talking about the proceeding of doubtful honesty that consists in annexing a country and a people over whom we have no right other than that of the stronger; even if aren't talking about the mentality of inferior or so-called inferior peoples the way you and I do of herds of lambs we shear before we eat, thinking about what is called colonization, I see aspects of this that lead me to reflect ...
There are the peaceful villages decimated by forced labor, our murderous industry suddenly imported and imposed, military expeditions devastating the countryside, spreading terror, hatred, hunger ...
There is a country flooded with blood by soldiers whose animal instincts are unleashed, with villages set on flame, men executed en masse, women raped ... What irony: other people's fatherlands are set to the torch and the sword by our patriots.
And that's what will happen to those we civilize. And to us?
It will be our sons, our brothers, and our fathers setting off for there attracted by misleading appearances and returning to us — when they return — burned by fever, degraded, polluted, rotted. It will be the little soldiers we'll send to put down future revolts and who will certainly never return. And even though I don't feel sorry for those who will go there and die working at a task fit for murderers, I think of the void that will be left here by the departed sons and fiancés, intoxicated by big words.
And for we rebels who don't want to don military garb, it will be the penal colony, the famous ones in Africa, and the disciplinary companies where they kill and torture.
Our bourgeoisie will grow fat on all this monetized blood and sweat. The money picked up over there in the mud, in the bloody shade of the forests, will serve to enslave us here and pay the executioners.
And for the unscrupulous, the scoundrels of all kinds, the good-fornothings for whom the social order isn't able to provide work, it will be an ocean of troubled water where they can fish at their ease.
This is why all the statistics, all the millions they'll throw at us, the reasoning of the deputies of every party, don't convince me of the benefits of colonization.
And those who will speak of the noblest reason, of the duty of the civilized, I'll say that they'd do better to first civilize the native savages of the villages of our bloody Flanders or some corner of Marolles, and that it would seem more useful to me to use my millions to lessen the exploitation of whites!
(Le Communiste, May 1, 1908)
CHAPTER 4
Anarchists!
ANARCHY, ANARCHISM, ANARCHIST!!! HORRIFYING WORDS THAT FREEZE WITH fright and make those ignorant of their meaning tremble.
Anarchist!
The bourgeois shudders, a mute anger in his eyes. For him it's the irreducible enemy, the man upon whom neither palliatives, contracts, nor promises have any effect. The bourgeois is stupid: he reads little, doesn't study at all, and less than anything shows any concern for anarchist theory. He only knows of it from the blows delivered by its supporters. When you speak to him of anarchism he recalls violent strikes, expropriations, bombs, Ravachol ... And he fears for his skin, for his property, for all his happy parasitism that he sees is threatened.
Anarchist!
The worker looks at you flabbergasted and slightly frightened. Ah, yes ... dynamite, direct action, the implacable war on exploiters, but also the war on the gutless, on the cowardly, on the imbeciles sleeping through their oppression who feel that "things have always been this way and they'll always be this way ..." The worker is troubled. He fears for his peace of a submissive beast; he is ashamed of his weakness. But above all, he knows nothing about anarchism, and the weak fear what they don't know.
Anarchist!
The socialist has a vague smile of scorn and condescension. "You want to jump over stages. You're going too fast." What a weak argument and how badly it hides all the ignorance and timidity of people who are used to being led and find shepherds necessary. An argument for those who are frightened by action. An argument of those who never heard our ideas ...
Anarchist!
The scientist and the scholar, those officials of the formulas of knowledge, furrow their brows. For them the anarchist is the heretic who laughs at his dry formulas, logically examines the most age-old gospels. He is the non-indoctrinated, the man outside of every church, even the monist ...
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Anarchists Never Surrender by Victor Serge, Mitchell Abidor. Copyright © 2015 PM Press. Excerpted by permission of PM Press.
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